How to monitor multiple security cameras at once

Every control room has the same quiet admission. There's a wall of nine tiles, or sixteen, and a person whose whole job is to watch it, and when something actually happens it still gets found the next day by whoever reviews the recording. That isn't a staffing failure. Nobody's attention survives an hour of nothing happening, and most CCTV is many hours of nothing happening.

Why watching more screens doesn't scale

Each camera you add divides the watcher's attention a little further, and the important feed is never the one being looked at when it matters. Motion alerts don't rescue the situation either, because on a busy site everything is motion: deliveries, cleaners, weather, a door that swings. The alerts become one more thing to ignore. The bottleneck is human attention, so a fix has to take attention out of the loop rather than stretch it across more tiles.

Flip it: every feed watched, only the moments surfaced

Svid has a vision model read every frame of every connected feed, live, writing a plain-English description of what's happening: people, objects, actions, hazards. The people on shift don't watch tiles. When a check fires (a weapon, a concealment, someone in a restricted zone) the alert links straight to the moment in the footage, and the wall of everything becomes a short list of things worth a look.

1. 01

   Connect the feeds

   Create an account at app.svid.ai, then add each camera from the Add tab. RTSP streams from your existing cameras and recorders are captured on our side, and a spare phone signed in at app.svid.ai/live.html covers a corner with no wiring. Nothing new goes on the wall.

2. 02

   Organise the Library into folders

   Footage lives in a Finder-style folder tree that holds live and recorded footage together. Folders nest (stores/london/entrance), so each site or floor gets its own, and moving a feed is drag-and-drop.

3. 03

   Run checks per folder

   Switch on checks where they earn their keep: Weapon Alert on the entrances, Theft Watch on the shop floor, Restricted Zone Intrusion on the plant room. A check runs across a whole folder in one action, and each is priced in the Store from your own usage.

4. 04

   Watch one Alerts tab, not sixteen tiles

   Everything flagged lands in the Alerts tab, filterable, and can also go out by email or by JSON webhook into whatever the team already watches. One event fires one alert; a check re-firing within two minutes is recorded as the same event continuing.

One searchable Library instead of many silos

There's a quieter payoff beyond the alerts. The search bar searches the folder you're in, subfolders included, so from the top of the tree “white van at the loading dock after 6pm” is one query across every site, and standing in stores/london scopes the same question to one building. Answering “what happened overnight on the east side” becomes a typed sentence rather than a tour of recorders in three different buildings; the search guide covers what that looks like in practice.

What watching everything costs

The price scales with what you watch. Onboarding at app.svid.ai asks four questions, estimates the AI compute your cameras need (cameras, hours a day and watch level, discounted for the frames where nothing moves) and prices from that, with a $9 a month minimum. The derivation is on screen before you pay, and all three watch levels are priced side by side, so you can see what watching sixteen cameras more closely actually costs. The pricing section has the arithmetic.

How many cameras can one person realistically watch?

Fewer than any video wall implies, and not for long. Watching live feeds is sustained vigilance against hours of nothing, and attention quietly leaves the room well before the shift ends. That's an observation about people, not a criticism of any particular team.

Does AI monitoring work live, or only on recordings?

Both, identically. Live and recorded footage go through the same pipeline, so the system that raises alerts on this morning's feed is the same one you search last week's footage with.

Can I monitor cameras across several sites in one place?

Yes. Each site gets its own folder in the Library, live feeds and recordings sit together, and everything flagged lands in the same Alerts tab. Searching from a parent folder covers every site below it.

What happens when it spots something?

An alert lands in the Alerts tab, and by email or JSON webhook if you've routed it there. Each alert links to the moment in the footage, so the first human look starts at the right frame, and a repeat within two minutes is logged as the same event continuing.